When I suffered a bizarrely bad disk crash (i.e., it crashed in an odd way that was much more destructive, and made the data much harder to recover, than most crashes; I've forgotten most of the details, but I remember that) a few years ago, I took my disk to a recovery specialist that does, among other things, contract work for the FBI. I got a brief glimpse inside their clean room. They had disks that had been pounded with hammers, run over with trucks, immersed in salt water... you name it, these guys could get data off it.
This kind of response -- "If you don't like what Company X is doing, do it yourself" -- comes up every time any kind of corporate misbehavior is discussed, and it seems to me that the people who say it don't understand the concept of "middle ground." Look, I like LJ. It's a good service for a good price. I don't have any particular desire to set up my own blog; I'd rather use theirs, and I'm willing to pay for it. So, as a paying customer, it's my hope that when they do something I don't like, I can persuade them to change their ways by complaining about it.
If every single person who was dissatisfied by every single thing every single company did just went off and did their own thing, let's face it, the economy would fall apart. Just as the "four boxes" should carefully be used in the proper order when trying to change the government -- jump ahead from soap to ammo, and you'll quickly find yourself alone and in a heap of trouble -- so there is a reasonable continuum of customer response to corporate action, from "enthusiastic recommendation" on one extreme to "boycott" on the other. And there's a whole lot in between.
Those that say "Free Speech" mis understand the intended purpose- the Government can not Censor a Newspaper
This is, itself, a classic misunderstanding. Free speech is a natural right; the Constitution only prevents the government from infringing on it*, true enough, but this does not mean that when any other body prevents you from speaking, they are not infringing on your rights. Corporate censorship is still censorship. You just don't have as much legal recourse.
*Theoretically. In practice, of course, the government infringes on freedom of speech all the time, and we put up with it.
MySpace isn't the government, and this woman is still "innocent", and is, in fact, not a sex offender, regardless of whether MySpace's own internal processes "identified" her as one.
As TFA points out, MySpace provides list of users whose accounts it deletes for such reasons to law enforcement. It's very unlikely that the Colorado AG's office had Ms. Davis listed as a sex offender since the offenses were committed by a different person in other states; now, quite possibly now it does.
Since the only mechanism via which MySpace can identify possible sex offenders registered on the site is comparison of items such as name, locale, DOB (for which many public lists, even of sex offenders, only use the month), etc., is this surprising? That someone with the same name, same birth month (which might have been all the matching information they had), and same location, which is pretty much all the information they have, could be seen as a match?
Her name is Jessica Davis, for God's sake. There are probably at least two people with that name in the US who share a birthday for every single day of the year! If she had a (much) rarer name I could see why this happened; and I can see why an automated records check might have turned up her name as someone to look at, but presumably a human being had to make this decision, and any human being with an ounce of sense would have realized that name and birth month is not nearly enough for a match in this case.
(arguments about an 18 year old with his 16 year old high school sweetheart getting tagged as a "registered sex offender" aside)
"Arguments about the three thousand dead people aside, September 11th 2001 was a really nice day!"
Sure, the mechanism for identifying such people may be imperfect, but again, repeat after me: MySpace is NOT the government, even if it was acting under pressure from various states/municipalities/etc.
When MySpace starts acting like the government, and in cooperation with the government, it's no longer just filling the role of a private corporation. If you're not a cop, you probably don't spend a whole lot of time thinking about things like probable cause and Miranda warnings -- but if you go around gossiping about how you think one of your neighbors is a child molester because he has the same name as somebody you read about in the papers, you're still going to be liable when events run their course and the false arrest suit is filed.
Because the Constitution is the law of the land. All federal law is made under its authority; any law passed by Congress which contradicts it is null and void. Of course times change, and the Constitution may have to change as well -- but there is already an existing mechanism, the amendment process, for doing that. If we need to change what the Constitution says, the right way to do it is to pass an amendment, which is quite deliberately set up to be difficult but not impossible. The wrong way to do it is to say, "Oh, they wrote that in the 18th century, it doesn't apply any more, so we'll ignore it and do as we please."
When properly used, I like email in that it provides an asynchronous means of communication which does not become time dependent. I can send someone an email at 2:30AM when I happen to awake and just check for an answer later that day or the next. If I really need an instant reply, there's always the phone.
Yes, exactly. That's the beauty of properly used e-mail. This is particularly true on large, collaborative projects (especially if some of the collaborators are in drastically different time zones) and it's nice for personal communication as well, since it gives you time to sit down and really think about what you're going to say.
The problem (besides spam, of course) is that a lot of people seem to regard e-mail as a kind of clunky-but-convenient chat program. They fire back uninformative five-word responses immediately and expect everyone else to do the same. Now, there are times when this kind of back-and-forth may be useful (e.g. exchanging code snippets) but honestly, mostly it's a useless PITA.
freedom isn't some mass produced, commoditized beast of a city, it's the sleeping on the porch without fear of some gang banger popping a cap in you.
Freedom is living your life how you like. You like sleeping on the porch. I like having a bunch of stuff to do within walking distance. If you think the city is just a "mass produced, commoditized beast" then you're just as prejudiced as the stereotypical urban dweller who thinks everyone in the country has three teeth and marries their cousins.
If you read the entirety of what Stevens said (another reply to your post contains a link to a Wikipedia article with the complete quote) it's quite clear that he has absolutely no clue what he's talking about. To the degree that his "series of tubes" metaphor makes sense, it's only by blind luck.
Also, it doesn't make sense, because while it's quite true that pipes/tubes/whatever are a major part of the internet infrastructure, they're far from the most important part in terms of overall performance. Bandwidth is cheap; AFAIK there's still a bunch of dark fiber lying around from the dot-bomb days. Routing is a much bigger concern.
And while the preceding paragraph should be quite understandable to most/.ers, to Stevens it might as well be written in Urdu. Given that at the time he made that speech, he was in charge of the Senate committee which has the most direct influence on the future of the internet, this should scare the hell out of anyone who's paying attention.
Jesus Christ, that article is one of the most buzzword-laden pieces of crap it's ever been my misfortune to read -- and after eight years in the military, eight years in corporate IT, and ten years in academia, you'd better believe I've read my share of buzzword-laden pieces of crap. It may indeed be true that "innovation can be taught," but any system that describes itself the way TRIZ does (the Wikipedia article was clearly written by a shill) is pretty much guarenteed to be good for nothing but separating gullible PHB's from their money.
Sure you can say Jobs did not invent Postscript or the WIMP interface or word processing in full-time graphic or music players or any number of things. But he was such an early and wholehearted adopter of nascent technologies that he is a pioneer. Pioneers did not invent the conastoga wagon or canoes they set forth in but they used them to blaze trails and set up the future.
You know, I really like that analogy, and I'll extend it one step further: the people who actually invented those things were explorers, and some explorers come back rich and covered in glory, but most die miserable deaths a long way from home. The pioneers are a bridge between exploration and real settlement.
Pointing out hypocrisy is not fallacious. The "you can't criticize the guy, that's the ad hominem fallacy" line (mercifully, you skipped the usual addition of a link to some philosophy department's page on logical fallcies, complete with straw-man examples) gets thrown around a lot in online arguments, and it's very often just wrong. There are in fact at least three good reasons to attack the arguer as well as the argument:
- Hypocrisy, as in this case, because it weakens the argument; if you're arguing for a change in the rules, it's a lot less convincing if you mean "the rules for other people." Halprin wants his proposed change in the law to apply to his own work but not Shakespeare's, which violates the (justly revered, although alas not always followed) principle of legal consistency.
- Lack of knowledge. Now, Halprin has plenty of knowledge about writing, so this isn't applicable here. But if it were an argument over, say, operating system security, his opinion really wouldn't be worth much (unless, of course, he works on that too; but I kind of doubt it.)
- Conflict of interest. If your house is robbed, and your neighbor says he doesn't know anything about it, most of the time it's reasonable to believe him. But if you notice that your neighbor has a shiny new TV that looks remarkably like the one that just got stolen from your house, maybe his denial should be treated with a little more suspicion. Halprin stands to gain from his proposed change (or at least he thinkshe does; I suspect he'd be dismayed at the results if it actually happened, unless he dies before the stultifying effect sets in) and so he will, like anyone else, be tempted be less than perfectly honest in his argument.
I think it was a far more civilized time in many respects. For example, I think it's a pretty recent development that a non-trivial bloc of the population would actually cheer for the assassination of President Bush. Now, regardless of whether we agree with his policies, I find that pretty disgusting. I think partisanship and common decency have plunged to new depths just as human rights overall and quality of life have risen to great heights.
There was a pretty substantial bloc of the population that cheered Lincoln's assassination, you can be sure. And, in case you;ve forgotten, when Lincoln was shot, Americans had just got done with four years of mutual slaughter that cost more lives than all our other wars combined. 3400 dead in Iraq? Hell, in those days they could spend that quantity of blood in an hour. (And, of course, Europe was just beginning the political process that would lead them, in another couple of generations, to Verdun and the Somme, which made even Gettysburg look like a minor tiff.) The nineteenth century may have been a much more polite time, but in terms of concern for human life, we're paragons of virtue these days compared to our forebears.
"Denialist" isn't a word. I think you're looking for "skeptic". You know, unless you are intentionally using prejudicial, made-up words to discredit people who may disagree with your conclusions, or at least how much faith we can put in them.
A skeptic is able to be convinced by sufficient evidence. The "global warming isn't happening and even if it is humans have nothing to do with it, nyaah nyaah nyaah I can't hear you" crowd clearly isn't. So some other word than "skeptic" is needed.
Parent post is not flamebait; it is an accurate description of the road behavior of many, many bicyclists. I don't know how many times I've passed a bicyclist on the street, carefully taking all the precautions I would take when passing any slow-moving vehicle (slowing down, moving as far as possible to the left, only settling back into my lane when I'm sure I've passed completely, etc.) and then stopped at a red light a block or two down... only to have the bicyclist come zooming past me, right through the red light, and have to repeat the whole process a little way past the light. And this can go on for light after light, seriously slowing down traffic and greatly increasing the chances of an accident somewhere along the line. Mention this to most bicyclists, though, and get ready for an earful of self-righteous rage.
As I'm sure many people will point out, the "life in prison" part is for situation "where the defendant knowingly or recklessly causes or attempts to cause death." That doesn't seem so unreasonable now, does it?
From TFA:
Justice Department officials gave the example of a hospital using pirated software instead of paying for it.
There is no way that using pirated software, even in a hospital, is the same as killing someone or trying to kill someone. Could someone die because hospital software doesn't work? Yes. Does this have anything to do with whether or not the software is pirated? Only if the manufacturer has some obnoxious copy protection scheme that causes the software to crash at odd moments if it's not properly registered; and as we've seen before, attempts at such copy protection always end up biting legitimate users in the ass too. It is impossible to create aggressive crippleware that is not at least sometimes going to cripple people who have actually paid for it. And if someone is making mission-critical medical software that behaves in that fashion, it is the manufacturer, not the user, who is at fault when people die as a result.
At a guess, Katee Sackhoff is closer to 140 lbs. than 100 lbs., most of it muscle. And if you're a 180-lb. guy who sits on his ass all day, I'll bet she could kick said ass into next week.
To "dispose" of the heat, the MAFIAA decides to rename it Digital Consumer Enablement... I'll write it off as "Digital Consumer Extortion" in my book as I expect every control-freak measures to be implemented in the name of DCA to be at least as potentially restrictive and encumbering as anything else that got introduced in the name of DRM.
Excuse me but, when is a state bound by political party rules?
When it's holding elections for political party nominations, of course.
This is yet another example of why both state and federal government need to get out of party politics. Unlike many of the posters here, I don't think the two-party system is necessarily a bad thing. Throughout American history, almost from the very beginning, there have been two major parties (and since the mid-19th century, those parties have been called Democrats and Republicans) but they've changed positions on just about everything several times; whenever an issue gets divisive enough, big chunks of one or both major parties splits away and join the other, or sometimes coalesces into a third which then becomes one of the big two, replacing the husk of one of the old ones. "The Democratic position on X" and "The Republican platform for Y" are by no means set in stone.
But that being said, there is no reason whatsoever why the government (any government) should treat the party nomination processes in the same way as official election processes. If Democrats in Florida or Republicans in Texas or for that matter Libertarians in North Dakota want to make their particular contribution to choosing their party's candidate on a certain day, that should be an issue between them and the national party leadership. And they should do it (primary, caucus, whatever) in a way they work out between them. There is no reason different parties have to do it at the same time, or in the same way, and most of all, neither the state nor federal government has any reason to be involved.
Without copyright, licenses like GPL are not enforceable and anyone (or any company) can re-release modified versions of the software in the most disassembly-hostile DRM encumbered binary-only form and use this to create confusion and to ultimately destroy what we have created.
And stopping them from doing that now is... what, exactly?
Seriously. There is nothing you can do to keep Microsoft or Oracle or Adobe, or, hell, Joe's Software down the street, from grabbing your GPL code, wrapping it up in their own project, and releasing the result only in binary where neither you nor anybody else will ever be able to prove it's there. Not, at any rate, without seeing their source code, which you never will, thanks to the "disassembly-hostile DRM encumbered binary-only form" they're alreay using as a matter of course.
Mind you, I'm not anti-copyright, although as many other posters have already said, current copyright law is insane and should be returned to something resembling its original form. (The phrase "for limited times" comes to mind.) But I have a hard time seeing how abolishing copyright would make individual, open-source coders any more vulnerable to corporate ripoff than they already are.
It's not just mean; it's stupid. (And not just because being mean to people when you don't have to is stupid, although that's also true.) Kind of a "boy who cried wolf" thing -- if your boss tells you every single thing you come up with is stupid, sooner or later you're going to stop paying attention to his judgement at all, and just go ahead and do your own thing regardless of what he says. OTOH, if he tells you that your smart ideas are smart, then when he tells you that one of your ideas is stupid, you'll pay attention.
Yes, I think this explains Microsoft's behavior in court... and also the general bug-ridden bloat of pretty much all their software, even the stuff that (unlike Bob) succeeds on the market. If no one has any yardstick by which to judge their work, then course most of their work is going to be crap.
Slashdot Mirror
When I suffered a bizarrely bad disk crash (i.e., it crashed in an odd way that was much more destructive, and made the data much harder to recover, than most crashes; I've forgotten most of the details, but I remember that) a few years ago, I took my disk to a recovery specialist that does, among other things, contract work for the FBI. I got a brief glimpse inside their clean room. They had disks that had been pounded with hammers, run over with trucks, immersed in salt water ... you name it, these guys could get data off it.
This kind of response -- "If you don't like what Company X is doing, do it yourself" -- comes up every time any kind of corporate misbehavior is discussed, and it seems to me that the people who say it don't understand the concept of "middle ground." Look, I like LJ. It's a good service for a good price. I don't have any particular desire to set up my own blog; I'd rather use theirs, and I'm willing to pay for it. So, as a paying customer, it's my hope that when they do something I don't like, I can persuade them to change their ways by complaining about it.
If every single person who was dissatisfied by every single thing every single company did just went off and did their own thing, let's face it, the economy would fall apart. Just as the "four boxes" should carefully be used in the proper order when trying to change the government -- jump ahead from soap to ammo, and you'll quickly find yourself alone and in a heap of trouble -- so there is a reasonable continuum of customer response to corporate action, from "enthusiastic recommendation" on one extreme to "boycott" on the other. And there's a whole lot in between.
Your faith is noted and appreciated, Comrade.
Those that say "Free Speech" mis understand the intended purpose- the Government can not Censor a Newspaper
This is, itself, a classic misunderstanding. Free speech is a natural right; the Constitution only prevents the government from infringing on it*, true enough, but this does not mean that when any other body prevents you from speaking, they are not infringing on your rights. Corporate censorship is still censorship. You just don't have as much legal recourse.
*Theoretically. In practice, of course, the government infringes on freedom of speech all the time, and we put up with it.
MySpace isn't the government, and this woman is still "innocent", and is, in fact, not a sex offender, regardless of whether MySpace's own internal processes "identified" her as one.
As TFA points out, MySpace provides list of users whose accounts it deletes for such reasons to law enforcement. It's very unlikely that the Colorado AG's office had Ms. Davis listed as a sex offender since the offenses were committed by a different person in other states; now, quite possibly now it does.
Since the only mechanism via which MySpace can identify possible sex offenders registered on the site is comparison of items such as name, locale, DOB (for which many public lists, even of sex offenders, only use the month), etc., is this surprising? That someone with the same name, same birth month (which might have been all the matching information they had), and same location, which is pretty much all the information they have, could be seen as a match?
Her name is Jessica Davis, for God's sake. There are probably at least two people with that name in the US who share a birthday for every single day of the year! If she had a (much) rarer name I could see why this happened; and I can see why an automated records check might have turned up her name as someone to look at, but presumably a human being had to make this decision, and any human being with an ounce of sense would have realized that name and birth month is not nearly enough for a match in this case.
(arguments about an 18 year old with his 16 year old high school sweetheart getting tagged as a "registered sex offender" aside)
"Arguments about the three thousand dead people aside, September 11th 2001 was a really nice day!"
Sure, the mechanism for identifying such people may be imperfect, but again, repeat after me: MySpace is NOT the government, even if it was acting under pressure from various states/municipalities/etc.
When MySpace starts acting like the government, and in cooperation with the government, it's no longer just filling the role of a private corporation. If you're not a cop, you probably don't spend a whole lot of time thinking about things like probable cause and Miranda warnings -- but if you go around gossiping about how you think one of your neighbors is a child molester because he has the same name as somebody you read about in the papers, you're still going to be liable when events run their course and the false arrest suit is filed.
lend the terrorists aid, confort and political cover to the ones with the AK-47s and the bomb belts
I believe that would be the Republican Party doing the aiding and comforting.
Because the Constitution is the law of the land. All federal law is made under its authority; any law passed by Congress which contradicts it is null and void. Of course times change, and the Constitution may have to change as well -- but there is already an existing mechanism, the amendment process, for doing that. If we need to change what the Constitution says, the right way to do it is to pass an amendment, which is quite deliberately set up to be difficult but not impossible. The wrong way to do it is to say, "Oh, they wrote that in the 18th century, it doesn't apply any more, so we'll ignore it and do as we please."
When properly used, I like email in that it provides an asynchronous means of communication which does not become time dependent. I can send someone an email at 2:30AM when I happen to awake and just check for an answer later that day or the next. If I really need an instant reply, there's always the phone.
Yes, exactly. That's the beauty of properly used e-mail. This is particularly true on large, collaborative projects (especially if some of the collaborators are in drastically different time zones) and it's nice for personal communication as well, since it gives you time to sit down and really think about what you're going to say.
The problem (besides spam, of course) is that a lot of people seem to regard e-mail as a kind of clunky-but-convenient chat program. They fire back uninformative five-word responses immediately and expect everyone else to do the same. Now, there are times when this kind of back-and-forth may be useful (e.g. exchanging code snippets) but honestly, mostly it's a useless PITA.
freedom isn't some mass produced, commoditized beast of a city, it's the sleeping on the porch without fear of some gang banger popping a cap in you.
Freedom is living your life how you like. You like sleeping on the porch. I like having a bunch of stuff to do within walking distance. If you think the city is just a "mass produced, commoditized beast" then you're just as prejudiced as the stereotypical urban dweller who thinks everyone in the country has three teeth and marries their cousins.
If you read the entirety of what Stevens said (another reply to your post contains a link to a Wikipedia article with the complete quote) it's quite clear that he has absolutely no clue what he's talking about. To the degree that his "series of tubes" metaphor makes sense, it's only by blind luck.
/.ers, to Stevens it might as well be written in Urdu. Given that at the time he made that speech, he was in charge of the Senate committee which has the most direct influence on the future of the internet, this should scare the hell out of anyone who's paying attention.
Also, it doesn't make sense, because while it's quite true that pipes/tubes/whatever are a major part of the internet infrastructure, they're far from the most important part in terms of overall performance. Bandwidth is cheap; AFAIK there's still a bunch of dark fiber lying around from the dot-bomb days. Routing is a much bigger concern.
And while the preceding paragraph should be quite understandable to most
Jesus Christ, that article is one of the most buzzword-laden pieces of crap it's ever been my misfortune to read -- and after eight years in the military, eight years in corporate IT, and ten years in academia, you'd better believe I've read my share of buzzword-laden pieces of crap. It may indeed be true that "innovation can be taught," but any system that describes itself the way TRIZ does (the Wikipedia article was clearly written by a shill) is pretty much guarenteed to be good for nothing but separating gullible PHB's from their money.
Sure you can say Jobs did not invent Postscript or the WIMP interface or word processing in full-time graphic or music players or any number of things. But he was such an early and wholehearted adopter of nascent technologies that he is a pioneer. Pioneers did not invent the conastoga wagon or canoes they set forth in but they used them to blaze trails and set up the future.
You know, I really like that analogy, and I'll extend it one step further: the people who actually invented those things were explorers, and some explorers come back rich and covered in glory, but most die miserable deaths a long way from home. The pioneers are a bridge between exploration and real settlement.
Pointing out hypocrisy is not fallacious. The "you can't criticize the guy, that's the ad hominem fallacy" line (mercifully, you skipped the usual addition of a link to some philosophy department's page on logical fallcies, complete with straw-man examples) gets thrown around a lot in online arguments, and it's very often just wrong. There are in fact at least three good reasons to attack the arguer as well as the argument:
- Hypocrisy, as in this case, because it weakens the argument; if you're arguing for a change in the rules, it's a lot less convincing if you mean "the rules for other people." Halprin wants his proposed change in the law to apply to his own work but not Shakespeare's, which violates the (justly revered, although alas not always followed) principle of legal consistency.
- Lack of knowledge. Now, Halprin has plenty of knowledge about writing, so this isn't applicable here. But if it were an argument over, say, operating system security, his opinion really wouldn't be worth much (unless, of course, he works on that too; but I kind of doubt it.)
- Conflict of interest. If your house is robbed, and your neighbor says he doesn't know anything about it, most of the time it's reasonable to believe him. But if you notice that your neighbor has a shiny new TV that looks remarkably like the one that just got stolen from your house, maybe his denial should be treated with a little more suspicion. Halprin stands to gain from his proposed change (or at least he thinkshe does; I suspect he'd be dismayed at the results if it actually happened, unless he dies before the stultifying effect sets in) and so he will, like anyone else, be tempted be less than perfectly honest in his argument.
I think it was a far more civilized time in many respects. For example, I think it's a pretty recent development that a non-trivial bloc of the population would actually cheer for the assassination of President Bush. Now, regardless of whether we agree with his policies, I find that pretty disgusting. I think partisanship and common decency have plunged to new depths just as human rights overall and quality of life have risen to great heights.
There was a pretty substantial bloc of the population that cheered Lincoln's assassination, you can be sure. And, in case you;ve forgotten, when Lincoln was shot, Americans had just got done with four years of mutual slaughter that cost more lives than all our other wars combined. 3400 dead in Iraq? Hell, in those days they could spend that quantity of blood in an hour. (And, of course, Europe was just beginning the political process that would lead them, in another couple of generations, to Verdun and the Somme, which made even Gettysburg look like a minor tiff.) The nineteenth century may have been a much more polite time, but in terms of concern for human life, we're paragons of virtue these days compared to our forebears.
the top 26 peer reviewed journal claims that supports the so-called climate change orthodoxy that have been proven false
It took me about three clicks to get to the references list for the National Academy of Sciences report that says the "hockey stick" is accurate. English, motherfucker, do you read it?
"Denialist" isn't a word. I think you're looking for "skeptic". You know, unless you are intentionally using prejudicial, made-up words to discredit people who may disagree with your conclusions, or at least how much faith we can put in them.
A skeptic is able to be convinced by sufficient evidence. The "global warming isn't happening and even if it is humans have nothing to do with it, nyaah nyaah nyaah I can't hear you" crowd clearly isn't. So some other word than "skeptic" is needed.
Parent post is not flamebait; it is an accurate description of the road behavior of many, many bicyclists. I don't know how many times I've passed a bicyclist on the street, carefully taking all the precautions I would take when passing any slow-moving vehicle (slowing down, moving as far as possible to the left, only settling back into my lane when I'm sure I've passed completely, etc.) and then stopped at a red light a block or two down ... only to have the bicyclist come zooming past me, right through the red light, and have to repeat the whole process a little way past the light. And this can go on for light after light, seriously slowing down traffic and greatly increasing the chances of an accident somewhere along the line. Mention this to most bicyclists, though, and get ready for an earful of self-righteous rage.
From TFA:
There is no way that using pirated software, even in a hospital, is the same as killing someone or trying to kill someone. Could someone die because hospital software doesn't work? Yes. Does this have anything to do with whether or not the software is pirated? Only if the manufacturer has some obnoxious copy protection scheme that causes the software to crash at odd moments if it's not properly registered; and as we've seen before, attempts at such copy protection always end up biting legitimate users in the ass too. It is impossible to create aggressive crippleware that is not at least sometimes going to cripple people who have actually paid for it. And if someone is making mission-critical medical software that behaves in that fashion, it is the manufacturer, not the user, who is at fault when people die as a result.
At a guess, Katee Sackhoff is closer to 140 lbs. than 100 lbs., most of it muscle. And if you're a 180-lb. guy who sits on his ass all day, I'll bet she could kick said ass into next week.
To "dispose" of the heat, the MAFIAA decides to rename it Digital Consumer Enablement... I'll write it off as "Digital Consumer Extortion" in my book as I expect every control-freak measures to be implemented in the name of DCA to be at least as potentially restrictive and encumbering as anything else that got introduced in the name of DRM.
Digital-Crippling Assholes?
But before you knew it, Dean stumbled, Kerry is the victor.
...
Yeah, that worked out well
Excuse me but, when is a state bound by political party rules?
When it's holding elections for political party nominations, of course.
This is yet another example of why both state and federal government need to get out of party politics. Unlike many of the posters here, I don't think the two-party system is necessarily a bad thing. Throughout American history, almost from the very beginning, there have been two major parties (and since the mid-19th century, those parties have been called Democrats and Republicans) but they've changed positions on just about everything several times; whenever an issue gets divisive enough, big chunks of one or both major parties splits away and join the other, or sometimes coalesces into a third which then becomes one of the big two, replacing the husk of one of the old ones. "The Democratic position on X" and "The Republican platform for Y" are by no means set in stone.
But that being said, there is no reason whatsoever why the government (any government) should treat the party nomination processes in the same way as official election processes. If Democrats in Florida or Republicans in Texas or for that matter Libertarians in North Dakota want to make their particular contribution to choosing their party's candidate on a certain day, that should be an issue between them and the national party leadership. And they should do it (primary, caucus, whatever) in a way they work out between them. There is no reason different parties have to do it at the same time, or in the same way, and most of all, neither the state nor federal government has any reason to be involved.
Has anyone ever observed a beneficial mutation? Like something getting better from mutation?
Yes.
Okay, class dismissed. I hope you were all paying attention, because this will be on next week's quiz.
Without copyright, licenses like GPL are not enforceable and anyone (or any company) can re-release modified versions of the software in the most disassembly-hostile DRM encumbered binary-only form and use this to create confusion and to ultimately destroy what we have created.
... what, exactly?
And stopping them from doing that now is
Seriously. There is nothing you can do to keep Microsoft or Oracle or Adobe, or, hell, Joe's Software down the street, from grabbing your GPL code, wrapping it up in their own project, and releasing the result only in binary where neither you nor anybody else will ever be able to prove it's there. Not, at any rate, without seeing their source code, which you never will, thanks to the "disassembly-hostile DRM encumbered binary-only form" they're alreay using as a matter of course.
Mind you, I'm not anti-copyright, although as many other posters have already said, current copyright law is insane and should be returned to something resembling its original form. (The phrase "for limited times" comes to mind.) But I have a hard time seeing how abolishing copyright would make individual, open-source coders any more vulnerable to corporate ripoff than they already are.
It's not just mean; it's stupid. (And not just because being mean to people when you don't have to is stupid, although that's also true.) Kind of a "boy who cried wolf" thing -- if your boss tells you every single thing you come up with is stupid, sooner or later you're going to stop paying attention to his judgement at all, and just go ahead and do your own thing regardless of what he says. OTOH, if he tells you that your smart ideas are smart, then when he tells you that one of your ideas is stupid, you'll pay attention.
... and also the general bug-ridden bloat of pretty much all their software, even the stuff that (unlike Bob) succeeds on the market. If no one has any yardstick by which to judge their work, then course most of their work is going to be crap.
Yes, I think this explains Microsoft's behavior in court